The press ran Al Gore through a wood chipper over a claim that neither he nor anyone associated with him ever made: that he invented the Internet. This lie took on a life of its own and contributed to the 2000 campaign narrative that Gore was a serial exaggerator who could not be trusted.
I keep waiting for a similar narrative to congeal around the campaign of John McCain, who has distinguished himself as one of the most breathtakingly dishonest politicians I have ever beheld. Cataloguing the lies of the McCain-Palin campaign has become a cottage industry, and even such McCain sympathizers as Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, and Andrew Sullivan have been forced to acknowledge the obvious: that McCain's reputation as an honorable politician is a complete fabrication.
So far, however, a meme about McCain's dishonesty has yet to develop.
That may be about to change.
Al Gore never claimed he invented the Internet. But McCain's top economic advisor just gave his boss credit for creating another technological marvel. Douglas Holtz-Eakin says John McCain invented the BlackBerry.
Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.First of all, this response is a complete non-sequitur. The question was, what does McCain know about financial markets? The answer is, he invented the BlackBerry? Even under the most generous interpretation, that he helped to create a climate in which such technological innovations are possible, that response ignores the question completely. By declining to answer, Holtz-Eakin is implicitly acknowledging that McCain knows nothing about how financial markets work. Of course, we already knew that from listening to McCain.
"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."
But this BlackBerry nonsense is the stuff that late-night comedy writers live for. I can hardly believe that with the recent coverage of the McCain campaign's dishonesty, anyone associated with it would say such a thing. But it's out there.
Of course, McCain will try to walk this back. Maybe he'll equate claiming you invented the BlackBerry with declaring your love for motherhood and apple pie, and that criticizing one is tantamount to attacking the others. Maybe that will work.
But when even the most slavish acolytes of the McCain Maverick myth are calling "foul" on the foulness that is his campaign, this could be a game changer.
UPDATE
By the way, even under the generous interpretation to which I alluded above, Holtz-Eakin's response makes absolutely no sense.
Research in Motion, the company that actually invented the BlackBerry, is Canadian.
